The Waihorotiu Stream
‘Queen Street River’ used to run down the centre of Auckland’s main
road before it was first turned into a canal, and then later diverted
into a sewer, where it now flows beneath Queen street.
The Tales of the Waihorotiu tell the
story of
another Auckland, one that lives beside and underneath capital
investment and economic growth.
It captures the hardships and humour of people who are forced to
navigate WINZ case managers, homelessness, violence and ill-health.
It is the story of what brings these
communities together as much as what drives them apart.
The Tales
of the Waihorotiu is Carin Smeaton’s first collection of
poetry.

Moonshine Eggs is
the
third novel in a trilogy of works based around the whimsical and
comedic character of Harry Rejekt. Inseparable from his dog and his
inherited crumbling farmhouse, Harry dreams of worldly travel whilst
rarely venturing out from the Waikato country town where he lives.
Adventure and love, gypsy friends, a Japanese backpacker, and various
eccentrics find him though, pottering about and nurturing the small
plot of land he calls home.

“Haley uses
his often very funny sentences to traverse and transgress the borders
between the real and the imaginary. Moonshine Eggs deploys the best of Haley’s
highly original qualities.”
— Ian Wedde

“ I love
the way his fiction presents us with a different New Zealand.”
— Roger
Horrocks

White City is a
collection of short stories set mostly in and around Auckland’s Albert
Park, but even those stories that travel far away from the park seem
subtly inhabited by its breezes, colours, shadows and sounds.

Brown
treats his characters with clear-eyed generosity, but never
condescension. They are often resourceful, though lacking in resources,
and tender, if tenuous connections are made between characters that are
not firmly connected to the mainstream grid.

“In
succinct, streetwise but beautifully crafted prose, Brown gives a voice
to those in society
who are seldom heard.”
— Bob Orr

“David fought hard for
his words. They did not come easily. But they are true coin and a
precious part of our literary heritage.” — Mike Johnson

A series of murders
breaks the dusty silence of a small rural town. Butades, the town’s
resident artist, is given the job of drawing lines around the bodies.
Without motive or suspect, and with the death count mounting, the
Police Chief becomes unhinged, and events lead to a Kafkaesque impasse
where no one remains free of suspicion.

“A crime
story that reads like a collaboration between
James Ellroy, Borges and David Lynch: hot, dusty, slippery and smart. A
meditation on the meaning of art and stories, life and death, isolation
and connection. Like Butades herself, this book has secrets.”
— Dylan
Horrocks

Taking the reader from
inner-city Auckland to fairy-tale clearings and finally into the burnt
hotel itself, these lyrical poems chart the terrain where the ordinary
meets the fantastical, a vivid world of “other people’s lives”
populated by lovers and rent-boys, sleep-walkers and monsters. At its
core is a subtle exploration of embodiment and the nature of being
human.

The Burnt Hotel
plays out like a dark melody. With what one poem calls ‘the violence of
dedication’, the writing returns to particular words, lines and
feelings like a ballad does to a refrain: loss, love, lemonade, a
razorblade. Olivia Macassey’s poems will lead you down strange, new
streets. They’ll follow you home. —
Hinemoana Baker

After Luce Cannon (Titus
Books, 2007) and The
Facts of Light (Vagabond Press, 2014), Carbon Shapes and Dark Matter
is Christie's third collection of poetry.

Time after time lines
come into focus, excoriating and yet lyrically beautiful.
— Jack Ross

‘Stephanie Christie releases poetry until the “mind is out of its
debt.” Political, vulnerable, arresting and inviting, the lines swerve
from cultural statement to imaginative implosion, often simultaneously.
We are given space, along with a gently addressed “you”, to attend to
the fracturable words of our ecological and bodily conditions. Dread
was never so lovely.’ — Lisa Samuels

When the British natural
philosophers of the 17th century founded modern natural history, they
proposed finding a poet to compile a poetic account of everything that
existed in nature, very broadly defined. Four hundred years later, the
work is ongoing, made modern and rigorous with rules and style-guides,
managers and research-poets.

This collection follows a year’s worth of submissions by one such
researcher-poet, but the poems are only half the story. The rest lies
in the revisions and comments—of both a professional and personal
nature—between the poet and the editor back at corporate offices. As
the relationship unravels, natural history becomes a tool of the
heartbroken and obsessed.

Holly Painter is a trickster poet, you never know where she’s going
next. Sometimes she wants to lick your ear. Over the page she might
chew your leg off. — John Newton

No Relation by
Thomas Pors Koed

Published May 2015
ISBN: 978-1-8774414-9-3
$30.00

Thomas Pors Koed’s
collection of short stories, No
Relation, is a
surprisingly ‘un-Kiwi’ book by a writer who has spent close to the last
fifty years residing in Nelson. Koed’s stories wrestle with the
constructs of character, identity, what is real and what must be
intuited from
information not provided. Coupled with elegant precise prose, an
obsession with
word and image, these short pieces comprise a unique addition to Kiwi
lit.

There is a child, the same age
as Leif perhaps, but so different, so thin, so pale. The skin is so
pale I can see the veins, the arteries, written like two words, one
red, one blue, on the forehead. The eyelids are stretched over the
balls in their deep sockets. Do they twitch? The upper lip, the
philtrum, is strangely pointed, protruding like a little soft beak over
the underlip. The lips are dry, the breath, hardly a breath, like
breath between two sheets of paper. But where has this child been? The
skin is powdered with dry earth, the hair, hair that looks like it has
never been cut, is full of earth, black dirt in the golden hair, hair
pale like a lightless flower (could there be such a thing?). There is
earth on the pillow, on the duvet, on the sheet. Quite a lot of it. The
bed perhaps is full of earth, earth and this strange child, this
stranger.

Alan Brunton played a
crucial role in
developing a platform for New Zealand poetry and theatre. Brunton was
the founding editor of poetry and arts publication Freed and co-editor
of Spleen,
he also established with partner Sally Rodwell the experimental theatre
group Red Mole. Beyond
the Ohlala Mountains
moves chronologically, in five parts, from 1968 until 2002. Drawing on
twelve published collections and the rich resource of his papers,
editors Michele Leggott and Martin Edmond present a selection that
shows for the first time the scope of Brunton's poetics as well as his
trademark linguistic bravura.

The Ballad of Rue
Belliard by
Bill Direen

Issue 48 of brief magazine

Published June 2013
ISSN 1175-9313
$20.00

Occupying a complete issue of Auckland based writing journal brief,
Bill Direen's The
Ballad of Rue Belliard celebrates the subtleties of
language and the humour of life in a "peripheral" sector of Paris. His
inventive use of English is a function of his linguistic alienation
from (but admiration for) the subtleties of local French language in
all its registers - elegant, vulgar, argotic ....

Tourtagebuch
by
Bill Direen

Translated by Arno Löffler

Published Sept 2012
ISBN: 979-10-91280-00-6
$10.00

Tourtagebuch is the German translation of a tour diary Bill Direen kept
while travelling 4,000 kilometres across 'German-speaking Europe' with
a group of musicians in 1994. Translated by freelance journalist and
arts and culture editor Arno Löffler, Tourtagebuch is Direen's second
book to be translated
into German.

Feeding
the Gods
by Scott Hamilton

Photos
by Kendrick Smithyman

Published Nov 2011
ISBN: 978-1-877441-44-8
$30.00

Scott Hamilton’s second
book of poetry takes us back to the
strange yet strangely familiar territory he began to map in
his acclaimed debut. In these poems the tyrannies of linear
time, Cartesian logic, and geometric space are overthrown, so that a
Japanese U boat surfaces in Kawhia Harbour, Hongi
Hika attacks twenty-first century Auckland, Ulysses comes home to a
South Pacific Ithaca, Ozymandias is reborn as Hosni Mubarak, the
Australian Outback fills with water, Philip Clairmont escapes from a
police raid by stepping into one of his paintings, and the
author returns to the South Auckland of his
mispent youth.

Last
night I dreamed that history was correcting itself. A
huge hand lifted houses off the plain, as though it were clearing the
board after a game of monopoly. Cows swelled to the size of hot air
balloons, and drifted away over the Firth of Thames. The eels made
themselves into question marks, as their ditches ran like mountain
streams. In the emptied fields kahikatea got slowly to their feet,
stretched their branches, and shook themselves dry, like the
resurrected dead on Judgement Day, or swagmen after a kip.
All those
straight roads were rolled up like barbed wire. I looked down, and saw
both my legs dissolving into the cool forest air...

The
Second Location
by Bronwyn Lloyd

Published Nov 2011
ISBN: 978-1-877441-45-5
$30.00

‘Never Get Taken to the Second Location.’

This book abducts you. It
takes you to unfamiliar places.
Using the doomed love affair of painter Rita Angus and musician Douglas
Lilburn as a backdrop, Bronwyn Lloyd’s first collection of stories is a
leap into the surrealist dark. From her tale of doppelgänger suicide,
‘Sink or Swim,’ to the haunting cancer landscape of ‘Kaikuia,’ this
collection may be strange, disturbing, and worrying, but it is never
dull.

Bronwyn
Lloyd completed
a PhD in English at the University of
Auckland in 2010. Her doctoral thesis provides a literary and art
historical account of Rita Angus’s symbolic portraits. Since 1999
Bronwyn has published catalogue essays and articles on New Zealand
painting, applied art and design as well as a number of short stories.
She currently teaches Academic and Creative Writing at Massey
University, School of English and Media Studies (Albany) and works as a
freelance writer and curator.

Kendrick Smithyman was
regarded as one of New Zealand’s most
important poets. For decades, though, the uncompromisingly
intellectual, relentlessly experimental Smithyman had to endure
marginalisation and even ridicule at the hands of conservative editors
and critics. Some of Smithyman’s work was so far ahead of its time that
it can only now hope to find a wide audience. Private Bestiary
consists
of poems discovered by Scott Hamilton during his exploration of the
massive collection of private papers Smithyman bequeathed to the
University of Auckland library. These previously-unseen pieces
illuminate aspects of Smithyman’s life and work that were hitherto
obscure, and help us appreciate the extent of his achievement as a
writer and a man.

The editor of the book Dr
Scott Hamilton, who is himself a
widely-published scholar and poet, has complemented the poems with an
introduction and extensive notes. “These poems are taonga”, Hamilton
says. “They show us that Smithyman was a poet not just for the
twentieth but for the twenty-first century. The rest of us are in some
ways still trying to catch up with him.” Associate Professor Peter
Simpson of The University of Auckland, who knew Smithyman as a friend
and colleague and edited his Selected and Collected Poems, praises the
new book for adding to our understanding of Smithyman. “Smithyman is
the Walt Whitman of New Zealand” Simpson says. “He contains multitudes,
because his interests were so vast. In many ways he is a mountain we
have yet to climb. I hope this book helps find him a new generation of
readers, and delights established Smithymaniacs.

Kingdom
of Alt by
Jack Ross

Published
Sept 2010
ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8
$40.00

Is writing about staying
on the sidelines, or getting involved
- marginal observation, or “skyline operations” (Auden)? This book
offers a series of takes on the possibility of a truly engaged
literature. Not all the conclusions it comes to are entirely
pessimistic.

Kingdom
of Alt is
Ross’s second book of short stories.

You’ll
all have your own
story about how you first encountered
the magic kingdom of Alt. As a teenager growing up in the depths of the
Auckland suburbs, I believe that discovery saved my life. – Roger
Horrocks, launch speech for Monkey
Miss Her Now (24/10/04)

The
Constant
Losers by Alex Wild

Published
Sept 2010
ISBN 978-1-877441-14-1
$30.00

A novel of text-talk,
musomania, mix tapes, student bars and
library intrigues, The
Constant Losers starts with a google search for
‘boykrew fan club’ and ends in a ‘zine war’. The book’s heroes are two
students whose strange relationship begins in print and develops
through a series of chaotic encounters.

Packed with graffiti
art,
found notes, pencil sketches, music
criticism and suprisingly sordid stories of worklife in an Auckland
library in the early noughties, The
Constant Losers celebrates and
castigates twenty-first century youth culture. Wild has a sharp eye for
the improvised spelling, grammar, and
morality of the cellphone generation, but The Constant Losers
also
shows off her concern with literary form and tradition, and her almost
anthropological ability to examine and interpret her
characters.

Travesty
by
Mike Johnson

Graphic
Art by Darren Sheehan

Published July 2010
ISBN 978-1-877441-13-4
$35.00

In a neglected corner of
Travesty, in an apartment building
called the rathouse, five marginals take on the universe. Drunk Len
takes a gamble on salvation, but can he find the ticket? Nisa
Michelangelo reconstructs his David with a vital difference, but can
art defeat time? Dr Reingold, the keeper of the files, finds himself
doing the bidding of his hidden masters, but will he betray his
patient? Dilly Lilly goes exploring through her tunnels of soft toys in
search of her mother’s funeral, but what will she do with the mutant
baby rat? And Glow Harvey steps into the world of probabilities on an
odyssey of discovery, helped by his mysterious girlfriend Hermes, but
will he remember enough to avert the destruction of Travesty by The
Lion King and his terrorist allies?

It all comes together on
the Day of Delight.

Welcome to Travesty, where
the stringent laws of purgatory
rule and every nerve is put to the test. Mike Johnson’s first graphic
novel and his strangest creation to date.

Wall
by
Ellen Portch

Published May 2010
ISBN 978-1-877441-12-7
$35.00

The drawings that comprise Wall
allude to trauma and institutionalisation. They do not form a
straightforward narrative or make some simplistic statement. They
have the urgency of improvisations, yet they are carefully organised
and almost
painfully detailed with naked walls and bodies inside sparse antiseptic
spaces.
The drawings are not the literal representation of an experience so
much as a
protective editorial process of expression. Together the drawings have
the elusive logic of a nightmare.
Their mystery is part of their terror.

On
the Eve of
Never Departing by Richard von Sturmer

Published Sept 2009
ISBN 978-1-877441-09-7
$30.00

Gregory O’Brien described
Richard von Sturmer’s last published
work, Suchness: Zen
Poetry and Prose, as “a book of almost
hallucinogenic clarity”. In his new prose collection, On the Eve of
Never Departing, von Sturmer shines his clear, poetic
light on a number
of subjects, ranging from growing up in Auckland in the 1970’s to Zen
encounters in T’ang Dynasty China. Landscapes and paintings play a
predominant role, and the reader will find him/herself exploring the
south-western deserts of the United States as well as the canvases of
Antonello da Messina and Casper David Friedrich. Gem-like details from
the early Renaissance, echoes of German Romanticism, and the streets of
Auckland city all form part of this unique work.

Free
Fall by
Rogelio Guedea

Published Sept 2009
ISBN 978-1-877441-10-3
$25.00.

Rogelio Guedea is a
Mexican poet, essayist, and novelist
currently residing in New Zealand. His last book Driving a Trailer
Truck (Random House Mondadori, 2008). was awarded the
Silverio Cañada
Prize 2009 granted to the best Spanish novel published in 2008. He is a
columnist for the Mexican newspapers Ecos de la Costa and La Jornada
Semanal and currently coordinates the Spanish and Portuguese Programme
at the University of Otago.

Just on the border between
the prose poem and poetic prose
these short narrations by Rogelio Guedea never cease to surprise with
their powerful emotions locked in everyday scenes so that they acquire
a strange tinge of exoticism. – Sandra Cohen.

Writers in Residence and other captive fauna by Ted
Jenner

Published May 2009
ISBN 978-1-877441-09-7
$25.00

Ted Jenner is a poet,
translator, and classical scholar who was born
and bred in Dunedin. He has spent the last forty years living in
Africa, Europe, and the northern parts of Aotearoa, publishing his work
in a variety of literary journals. Writers in Residence is a
compilation of most of Jenner’s short fiction and prose poetry written
in the last twenty years in New Zealand and Malawi. It has as its basic
theme a search for meaning in a world which is resistant to such a
search -- the meaning lies in the exploration itself.

Texts that combine a
detailed scrutiny of place, and the
objects and ‘spirit of place’, that become rather an archaeological
‘dig’ in the unstated but present, presence of Herakleitos – where
‘deep equals true’. – Michael Harlow

Skin
Hunger
by David Lyndon Brown

Published May 2009
ISBN 978-1-877441-08-0
$20.00

Like Brown’s book of
short stories Calling
The Fish and his
novel Marked Men,
Skin Hunger
explores a seedy but loveable Auckland of
crumbling Bohemian villas, underfurnished apartments and twenty-four
hour bars. The poems set amidst Auckland’s gay community have
considerable sociological and historical value, despite the fact that
they eschew generalisation and political rhetoric.

Here is a poet who
‘exposes himself to love’, sex and ‘life as
legend’ with courage, exuberance and hunger. Gripping, nostalgic and
‘hot’, these poems, ‘gleaming with treasure’ and populated with lively
literary ghosts, are a compulsive read. – Riemke Ensing

bad appendix
by Jen Crawford

Published
June 2008

ISBN 978-1-877441-05-9
$20.00

Jen Crawford’s bad
appendix may be
the most daring book of
poetry published anywhere this year. Crawford often writes about
everyday, apparently uncomplicated subjects - a walk down the road, a
kiss, a patch of grass with sun on it - but her language is dense and
mysterious. Reading bad
appendix is like walking through a formal
garden that gradually becomes a tangled forest.

Enclosures
by Bill Direen

Published
June 2008
ISBN 978-1-877441-06-6
$25.00

Direen’s fifth novel Enclosures is
infused with restlessness:
its interlocking stories move between France, Iraq, Wellington, and
some of the wilder sections of the New Zealand coast. Like Direen’s
2006 novel Song of the
Brakeman, which was full of frightening
allusions to Guantanamo Bay, Enclosures
is unified by the theme of
imprisonment. Like Direen himself, the characters of Enclosures are
shiftless figures, determined to escape the oppressive governments and
obsolete and encumbering codes of behavior that threaten to overwhelm
them.

EMO
by Jack Ross

Published
June 2008
ISBN 978-1-877441-07-3
$40.00

In the third volume of his
REM trilogy, after the urban
inferno of Nights with
Giordano Bruno (2000) and the purgatorial stasis
of The Imaginary Museum
of Atlantis (2006), Jack Ross explores the
closest thing to a paradise his cast of crazies can conceive of, let
alone aspire to.

Ross is a lapidarian scholar,
fluent in half a dozen
languages, but he is also a passionate fan of America’s Next Top Model,
and his writing has always refused to distinguish between ‘high’ and
‘low’ culture. The very look of EMO
mocks the conventions of both
literature and academic scholarship - texts are artfully layered on its
outsize pages, alongside photographs, cartoons, and cryptic diagrams.
Ross’s prose is full of dirty jokes, as well as learned asides and sad
observations. EMO
could keep you busy for years on a desert island –
Scoop review of books.

Marked
Men
by David Lyndon Brown

Published
Oct 2007
ISBN 978-1-877441-04-2
$25.00

Marked
Men tells
the story of love between two men. The drama
has a dream-like quality, that affirms the isolation and fragility of a
human being, bordered by skin, who aches for connection in the embrace
of another. David Lyndon Brown draws us into a world in which the
interplay of radiance and darkness, joy and terror would be relentless
if it were not interspersed with moments of searing wit and solid
friendship.

Conversation
with a Stone by Richard Taylor

Published
April 2007
ISBN 978-1-877441-01-1
$20.00

A former freezing worker
and sparkie who has lived all his
life in the working class Auckland suburb of Panmure, Richard Taylor
combines a love of language and learning with an earthy vibrant humour.
Mixing pub slang and physics, street yarns and chess tips, his poems
are both intellectual and highly accessible.

To the
Moon, In
Seven Easy Steps by Scott Hamilton

Published April 2007
ISBN 918-1-877441-02-8
$20.00

Auckland Ph. D. student
Scott Hamilton’s first book of poetry
inhabits the twilight zone between fact and fantasy, prose and poetry.
For Hamilton, writing is a game, a joke, a puzzle, a protest, and a
quest - sometimes all at the same time.

Scott Hamilton’s heroes,
like W.H. Auden’s ‘helmeted airman’,
are forever setting out on some doomed quest...Scott delves into the
mythopoetic past of New Zealand, showing that this past is alive and
shared. — Jack Ross

Luce
Cannon
by Will Christie

Published
April 2007
ISBN 978-1-877441-00-4
$20.00

Will Christie’s poetry is
fascinated by the power of language
to inhabit and be inhabited. Christie questions her words as she uses
them — tearing them apart or gathering them up, chasing them around or
wilfully creating new ones — with an alert attention to what they
contain and how they affect us. By
turns playful and violent, cerebral and romantic, funny and moving,
these poems take nothing for granted. What they reveal will often
surprise you.

The
Vertical
Harp: selected poems of Li He by Mike Johnson

Published
Feb 2007
ISBN 978-1-877441-03-5
$35.00

Medieval Chinese poet Li
He lived in the last brief flowering
of the T’ang dynasty from 790-816, his evocations of the heavenly and
the netherworlds are unique, possibly in the whole of the Chinese
canon, and are the source of his honorific title, ‘the demon talented
one’. Working from this fertile source, Mike Johnson has produced a
collection of poems that preserves the extravagant imagery of the
originals, while allowing them to be read unfettered in contemporary
English.

Song of
the
Brakeman by Bill Direen

Published
June 2006
ISBN 0-9582586-7-8
$28.00

Bill Direen’s fifth novel
takes place in a world where the
earth’s resources are almost exhausted, the water supplies are
contaminated and parts of the landmasses have imploded. A life and
death struggle occurs between two irreconciliable forces: one in
possession of the earth’s remaining wealth and power, the other
carrying the genetic key to the survival of mankind. Vibrant language
and a fast-paced narrative define this Ballardesque journey through a
post-apocalyptic landscape.

The
Imaginary
Museum of Atlantis by Jack Ross

Published
June 2006
ISBN 0-9582586-8-6
$25.00

The subject of Jack Ross’s
latest book is amnesia. A man
washes up alone on a beach with no memory of who or where he is; a
woman finds him and takes him back to her house. He scans her library
to find some clue to his past, his location. Could this strange new
world be Atlantis? Jack Ross captures the disoriented state of his lead
character in the very layout of the novel. Fragments of text and
narrative weave together to reveal a mind searching for its past, its
identity.

Love
in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction by Olivia Macassey

Published Oct 2005 -
unavailable -
ISBN 0-9582586-5-1
$20.00

Through public appearances
and recordings Olivia Macassey has
established herself as one to watch. Not only a distinctive voice, she
is developing a compelling personal style. Her work dares to disrupt
what have become poetic formulae. And yet, if you take time to read and
reread it, you will not find one line in Love in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction that is obscure, not one page that does not
raise a smile
of recognition, not one poem that does not astound you. With the gentle
balance of its lines, the craft of its composition and the depth of its
perception of the deepest of emotions, Olivia has created a work which
not only promises much, it is warm and intelligent work in itself.

New
Sea Land
by Bill Direen

Published
Oct 2005
ISBN 0-9582586-4-3
$20.00

Direen’s fifth book of
poetry was generated by a stay
south-east of Auckland in 2005. These poems are a response to place, to
landscapes, to seascapes, and to the seasonal occurrences he found
there. They are a personal, a psychological document, a poetic analysis
of contemporary New Zealand, as well as a philosophical analysis of the
past as it is contained in our present. If some of the poems are
emphatically musical and require a musical sense to “hear” them, others
are instantly-perceptible Whitman-like reflections upon the variety and
force of today’s New Zealand -- and its Sealanders.

Either
Side The
Horizon by Stephen Oliver

Published Oct 2005
ISBN 0-9582586-3-5
$10.00

In Stephen’s work to date,
he has never relented in his
attacks. His satirical work, of which there is a fair representation in
Either Side The Horizon,
lampoons not so much political figures as
their methods and the institutional hypocrisy they have inherited. His
favourite targets are those who say one thing while doing another, be
they oil lords controlling the happiness and destinies of millions of
families, or those appointed by an elite to govern the standards of
passionless culture. Either
Side The Horizon is a fine example of
Oliver’s nerve, his critical eye and his occasionally combative stance.

Curriculum
Vitae
by Olwyn Stewart

Published
May 2005
ISBN 0-9582586-2-7
$15.00

Olwyn’s story is a
concentrated hymn to slackers and bogans
everywhere. All those ex-hippies, all those old metallers, all those
drug-addled potheads have found, at last, their laureate. She
understands them, she can paint them with devastating wit and accuracy
— but, above all, they amuse her. One feels almost as Sargeson’s first
readers must have felt when his Kiwi characters started Speaking For
Themselves.

Coma
by William Direen

Published
May 2005
ISBN 0-9582586-0-0
$15.00

The actual present of this
novella is a rock concert in
Seattle, but seventeen years are contained in that present. William
Direen (aka songwriter Bill Direen) explores pleasures and regrets,
hopes and anxieties.

I’m
feeling the cold and the thinness of the air. I’m gaining
in size. I’m trying to turn. I’m swimming again in a fluid thickening.
My head goes under. I thump into a wall. My head is throbbing, my skull
is about to crack. The beat of a drum as loud as I can stand and the
swirl of a deafening Wurlitzer. I am curled up in the ear of a dragon.
Blood is pulsing under a membrane, I am in a tympanum, in a blood
vessel in a dragon’s brain, on the warm side of a peritoneal wall that
separates us - me and another - from others.

Trouble in Mind
by Jack Ross

Published
May 2005 - unavailable -
ISBN 0-9582586-1-9
$19.95

Trouble
in Mind is
an intense voyage into the life of a young
woman, and a serious reflection upon the art of novel-writing. It is at
once a twenty-first century novel and not a novel at all, but an
eyeball, subject and object, made up of a million cells.

Experimental, assured,
contemporary and local, Trouble
in Mind
is a healthy new leaf in the old stick of New Zealand lit. — Katherine
Liddy, Landfall #214

French/English
Journal — Percutio | 2006-2010

Percutio
2010
ISSN 1953-1427
$20.00

This year’s theme,
Necessity, was atmospheric rather than prescriptive in function, as
you’d suspect from the multivalent epigraph while I am now come to you, for
unbending necessity is upon me (Homeric Hymn to
Aphrodite). A formally imposing Ted Jenner poem approached Necessity
from a ballistic point of view (Newtonian), while the editor felt it
was ... necessary ... to publish Michael Steven’s The Hatchet Blade
(after Catullus) in its entirety. That the necessity of artistic
expression (vs its commercial motivation or usefulness) can provide
work of calibre, the rest of the contributions provide vibrant and
ample proof. In Percutio 2010, Number 4 you will find work by Peter
Olds, Sue Wootton, Silke Galle, Lisa Samuels, John Adams, Jacques
Coulardeau, Nick Ascroft, Richard Reeve, Greg Kan, Vaughan Rapatahana,
Gunther Dietrich, Stuart Page, Robin Maconie, Sandra Bianciardi, Arno
Loeffler, K.M.Ross, Scott Hamilton, Mark Williams and Grant McDonagh. A
few reviews of works that cross cultural lines impelled themselves,
unbendingly, onto the back pages.

Percutio
2009
ISSN 1953-1427
$20.00

Taking performance as its
starting point, Percutio 2009 includes poetry, playscript extracts,
articles, fiction, reproductions of photographs, collages of
performance artists, reviews and two obituaries of recently-deceased
rock and alternative rock musicians. As ever there is a strong
European-Antipodean element, featuring New Zealand, French-German, New
York, USA, Sri Lankan and Indian content.

Percutio
2008
ISSN 1953-1427
$20.00

This year’s theme was
Inspiration. The notion of the journal itself remains a cross-cultural
one, and this alone provides a framework for potential contributors.
This year the front cover artwork and an inner photographic series was
offered by Nigel Bunn, a reclusive photographer and sound engineer from
Dunedin. The rear cover and four drawings inside were offered by Sandra
Bianciardi. A Reviews section has been added to group together
contributions of this sort at the end. As usual work may be found here
in different languages, or pertaining to different cultures (English,
French, German, Ancient Greek, Singalese).

Percutio
2007
ISSN 1953-1427
$20.00

This year’s issue (82pp,
A5 format) offered contributors the theme of “Crucial Moments in the
Creation of a Work” as a starting point for poems, essays, photographs
etc. Achievement and metamorphosis qualify many of the short works
accepted, but, naturally, none can be described without paying specific
attention to each. Here you will find thoughts on a painter’s reality,
an ode to the city of Auckland, thoughts on a collaboration between a
poet and a composer, and a fascinating three-sided text inspired by a
work by Marie de France.

Percutio
2006
ISBN 0-9582586-9-4
$20.00

The Pilot Issue of a new
cross-cultural literary and arts journal which features writing in its
language of origin — where this is not English, a translation
accompanies it. This is the point of the journal, to bring together
poets, writers, political theorists, photographers, curators and
researchers from many different cultures and backgrounds who might
otherwise not be found in each other’s company! The editor, New
Zealander William Direen, was astonished at the quality and extent of
artistic output he encountered during his travels in Australia, the
U.S.A., and Europe, and discovered that there was an equivalent in all
these countries of the intense, serious, dedicated and often
unrecognized literary and artistic forces in his native New Zealand.
The result is a pilot issue that includes work by respected colleagues:
historians, painters, musicians, poets...